Reinhardsbrunn Abbey was a house of the Benedictine Order founded by the Thuringian landgrave Louis the Springer in 1085, against the background of the fierce Investiture Controversy between Emperor and Pope. It was settled by monks descending from Hirsau Abbey and soon evolved as a centre of the Hirsau Reforms in Thuringia. Like Hirsau, the Reinhardsbrunn monastery was closely related to Cluny Abbey; it stood under Papal protection from 1093. It was also of significance as the proprietary monastery and burial ground of the Ludovingian landgraves like Hermann I who was entombed here in 1217. The monastery became less important after the extinction of the Ludovingians in 1247. Nevertheless, their Wettin successors still used it as a dynastic burial site and an important chronicle was commissioned around 1340, reflecting the history of Thuringia and Germany back to the 6th century. The monastery was looted and sacked during the German Peasants' War in 1525. The monks took refuge within the walls of Gotha and the site was secularized and sold to the Electors of Saxony. While the surrounding estates were administrated by a Saxon Amtmann officials, the former monastery buildings fell into ruin.
Castle and park
Reinhardsbrunn was part of the Ernestine duchy of Saxe-Weimar from 1572. Duke Friedrich Wilhelm I had parts of the monastery rebuilt as a local administrative seat. The main castle building, restored in about 1706 under Duke Frederick II of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, was rebuilt as a pleasure palace - Reinhardsbrunn Castle - in 1827. Duke Ernest I of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, who had inherited the site the year before, built his summer residence here in an English style, surrounded by the first Romantic park in Thuringia. Ernst I was the father of Prince Albert, and hence the father-in-law to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. It was not, as has been alleged, at Reinhardsbrunn that Victoria met Albert for the first time. They met first in London in May 1836, though after their marriage and after Albert's death Queen Victoria did visit Reinhardsbrunn in 1845 and 1862. The Saxe-Coburg and Gotha family kept possession until the end of World War II, when, after some time in the hands of the East German state, the house and estate were used for a short time by Soviet Red Army forces as a military hospital and then for various functions by the government of East Germany, who opened the castle as a showpiece hotel in 1961. Listed in 1891 as one of the artistic landmarks of the duchy, and in 1980 as a landmark of national significance by East Germany, after German reunification the castle was registered in 1992 by the State of Thuringia as a historic monument. Together with its facilities and park, it passed from the Treuhandanstalt into the possession of Western hotel companies, then to a Weimar company, BOB Consult GmbH. BOB Consult was purchased in 2008 by a Russian investment consortium, Rusintech, which did not maintain the castle. The state of Thuringia performed needed repairs, and in July 2018 legally repossessed it to ensure its safety, the first such action in the Federal Republic.
